Retired Police Officer Claire Bradbury, and her friend Rachel Spires, are both running the Great North Run this year to raise money for Pancreatic Cancer UK. After battling cancer herself through lockdown, this will be Claire’s fourteenth time running after she first took part when she was only thirteen. They have set up a JustGiving page to raise money to the charity in memory of their friends and loved ones.
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00:00Okay, so 2019 that was my golden year. I turned 50 in the March, I retired in the July and then
00:07seven weeks into my retirement I was given the devastating news that I had breast cancer.
00:11Luckily it was caught really quickly and thanks to the fabulous NHS I had my chemotherapy really
00:17quickly. Unfortunately that took me into lockdown so I had a lot of that by myself
00:23but then still had surgery and radiotherapy and this June marks me five years cancer free.
00:29So also my golden year I'd planned to do my last Great North Run. I'd done 13, wanted to finish on
00:35an even number so I'd planned to do that that year as well and with my illness and then with
00:41Covid the following year didn't get to do it. So this year seemed like a really good year to do it
00:46and a really good reason to do it for pancreatic cancer. And this is very close to my heart
00:51because we lost one of my neighbours and one of my friends husbands to pancreatic cancer
00:57and we've discovered that it's a very underfunded and a lot of people know a lot about it because
01:03it has no symptoms, it has no sort of warning signs so it's close to my heart and we just want
01:08to raise a lot of money for pancreatic cancer. So I've also recruited my lovely friend here Rachel
01:14who is also running with me and the Great North Run. Despite being the fifth biggest cancer killer
01:19in the UK, pancreatic cancer only receives three percent of cancer research funding.
01:24There hasn't been a significant improvement to survival rates in over 50 years,
01:28therefore urgent research is needed. We've started doing a few longer runs on a Sunday.
01:34I already run with These Girls Can Run which is a locally based group which has different groups
01:39in different areas of the northeast, mainly sort of like locally but we run with more with These
01:44Girls Can Run. I obviously was very young when I did my first one, I did my first one in 1982
01:49but we have started upping our miles haven't we Rachel? So we're building up slowly to September
01:5413.1 miles so we're already getting the miles in well eggs as they say so slowly but surely.